ULIAN of Norwich, twice
over in her Showing of Love, speaks of theology as an.A.B.C., as God's
Alphabet. Dom Jean
Leclerq tells us that anchorites and anchoresses earned their
keep teaching children their A.B.C. and Latin.

Take away the alphabet
and the Bible and what would we have left of western culture?
Neither are European, yet Europe is culturally shaped by them,
deriving from them its mode of communication across time and
space, also its religion and its history, then spreading these
wherever Europe has conquered or settled, in Africa, Asia,
Australasia, the Americas.

Professoressa Maria Giulia
Amadasi, Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza', showed
the following alphabet (the order of the letters reversed, boustrophedon),
written
on
the side of a child's wax tablet, on which he was learning,
with a stylus, his letters.

Y T SRQ
PO NMLKJIHGFEDCBA

The names of our letters,
in Hebrew, Arabic and Greek,
are the same, despite many centuries, despite diverse
languages, in a shared technology:

Their names are pictographic
and polyvalent: aleph being ox and one; beth,
tent/house and 2; gimel , camel and 3; daleth,
door and 4; he, whistle and 5; vau , nail and 6;
zayin, weapon and 7; kheth , fence and 8; teth,
twisting and 9; yod,
hand and 10; kaph, palm and 20; lamed ,
ox-goad and 30; mem, water and 40; nun , fish
and 50; samech , support and 60; ayin, eye and
70; pe/phe , mouth and 80; tzadi, hook and 90; qoph
, coif and 100; resh, head and 200; sin/shin,
tooth and 300; tau, cross and 400. We, as the three
Peoples of the Book, are one family in this ancient technology
of alphabet and mathematics. What difference is there between a
clay cylinder incised with cuneiform symbols and a floppy disk?
Torah, Gospel, Koran are books that communicate across space and
time, in a past, present, future Internet.

However, Fioretta Mazzei wisely
reminds us not to despise those who are illiterate:

Along with postcards I
sometimes give alphabet and number cards, to Rom children,
knowing they are under-stimulated, lacking schooling, lacking
toys, needing something to chase away boredom, while sitting
begging with their mothers in the streets, an alphabet/number
game which could be of use later in their lives.

You, too, can copy these,
six to a page at a time, double-sided, printing them and
cutting them, to give to children, any children. But
especially children in need of them. Gypsy men tell me of
reading the Bible. But, with tears in their eyes, of their
difficulty in believing in God because of the treatment they
receive in the world. I have seen them turned away from
Christ's altar.

At the end of our
conference on the City and the Book in Florence in 2001 we
visited Fiesole, from which Troy was founded by Dardanus, and
from which Rome was founded by Aeneas, and from which Florence
was founded by Julius Caesar, seeing there Etruscan
inscriptions resembling Viking runes, for these, too, are
Phoenician in origin. The ' Dream of the
Rood ' was first inscribed in Anglo-Saxon runes on a
stone cross beyond Hadrian's Wall in Ruthwell, Scotland, then
in Roman letters on parchment in a manuscript left by a
pilgrim at Vercelli, Italy. Geoffrey Chaucer, who visited
Florence in the fourteenth century, tells us in the Canterbury
Tales of the pagan Anglo-Saxon King Alla of
Northumberland using a Celtic Bible, 'A Britoun book, written with Evaungiles', combining that tale with Constance's voyage
also to Islam ('Man of Law's Tale', II.B.666).

First Wulfila, then Cyril
and Methodius, invented quasi-new alphabets for translating
the Bible into Gothic, into Slavic. Fyodor Dosteivsky, writing
The Idiot in Florence in the nineteenth century,
describes his princely hero come home to Russia from
Switzerland, writing the signature in Cyrillic of the
fourteenth-century abbot Paphnutius, whose name
mirror-reflects that of the Desert Father in the Egyptian
Thebaid.

Our alphabet reached India,
reached Malaya, stopping short at China. Today, in the streets
of Florence, in the San Lorenzo market, Chinese immigrants
will paint for you in exquisite pictographic calligraphy,
worthy of a Laurentian Library manuscript, our Roman Alphabet
as they learn it, where A can be a pagoda, B, bamboo, C, a
crustacean:

This is what we should
teach our children, the wonders of the alphabet, how it had
also been a number system, how it came into being amongst
Semitic peoples, then propagated itself along trade routes,
how our alphabet organizes for us our libraries, our filing
systems, our computers, and how it reflects Creation's
alphabets, the atomic chart of elements, http://chemiplus.net/, the
biological codes of DNA,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dna, and once there from
Google: Everything is Miscellaneous, but
no more. Above all
how the alphabet is of one family, of humanity.

Where we fear
strange-seeming scripts we may resort to Holocausts, but not
when we appreciate the history of this gift, this tool, this
heritage. Our library in Florence, the Biblioteca e Bottega
Fioretta Mazzei, begins with the alphabet, then the Bible, the
Gospel, the Koran, in their original languages, then much
else, and ends with the children's shelf at their level, with
tiny Hebrew Psalters, always their favourite books in the
library, and the alphabet.

We must teach for the
world's future the world's past, and these lessons should be
at the lowest level for the youngest children at the age when
learning is most rapid and most important.

I taught Nursery School for
many years and would type their stories, then have them paint
the pictures for these books we wrote together, their books.
I've also had them paint their wooden alphabet blocks and
print them to see how the letters mirror-reflect each other,
coming out going in the opposite direction. St Jerome speaks of teaching girl babies
to read and write by giving them ivory tablets inscribed with
the letters of the alphabet so they could feel them as well as
see them. Projects like 'Operation Head Start' in America
insisting on keeping young Black children in the slums away
from books, saying they needed first to work on their
socializing skills, but in fact enforcing their illiteracy by
these means more subtlely though similarly as during slavery.
Women, for centuries, in the Church had taught young boys and
girls their alphabets in Dame Schools.

In the Hebrew Bible, God creates the world 'in number,weight and
measure'. The Hebrew alphabet is as
well a numerical system, numbers being letters, letters,
numbers, as well as objects, such as hand 'yod, palm, 'kaph'. I
give these small squares of paper, printed on each side, to
gypsy children and parents in Florence.

In the Middle Ages and
Renaissance little children learned to read from horn books
with the Alphabet and the Lord's Prayer. Madame Montesorri
gave slum children letters cut in sandpaper using red for
vowels, blue for consonants. I am teaching a gypsy mother
how to read so she can teach her children how to read. Among
the sheets of paper I have given her is this, the Lord's Prayer in Italian, for she
speaks three languages, Rom, Romanian and Italian:

Once we had Hedera and
her baby and a young priest from Kerala in India to dinner with
us. Between them they discovered that in their languages they
shared the same Indo-European word for 'bread'.

Julian
of Norwich, twice over in her text, speaks of theology as
an alphabet, as an.A.B.C. She likely taught the Alphabet and Latin to
boys and girls, who then became monks and nuns. Until Archbishop
Arundel's draconian prohibition
against women teaching, especially theology. From which time, instead, she
had to accept charity from those who willed her and her maids
money for their survival in St Julian's anchorhold in Norwich.